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How my first trip to Israel led to “The First Ever Yiddish Show in Egypt”
As one who has been eager to build a career in music and comedy online, I began to notice that about 25% of my views were coming from Israel. Messages started pouring in.
Friends who lived there told me people were talking about me. Promoters reached out about shows.
“When are you coming to Israel?”
But a severe fear of flying — and an anti-Zionist Satmar upbringing that included the burning of Israeli flags on Purim — grounded me. Then I booked a gig in Poland, a big step. If my career was going to grow, I couldn’t avoid overseas flights forever.
A few days later, Rabbi Dov Oliver called. The rabbi of Hillel of Rockland County, New York has been trying for years to persuade me to visit the Jewish State.
“Come on my Israel trip,” he said.
“If I can take one night off to do a show, I’m in,” I replied.
“Of course.”
And just like that, my first trip to Israel was happening.
We announced the show and tickets started selling immediately. Within days, dozens were gone and then it sold out. People were begging me for tickets.
The flight, however, was a nightmare. My seat was cramped, near the bathrooms, with barely any legroom and no window. Panic hit instantly. Every cell in my body screamed to run off the plane.
The anxiety came in waves for 11 hours. I cried, paced the aisles, talked with friends and flight attendants, and breathed through it.
Finally we landed. When the plane touched down in Israel, people started singing: “Hashem yitbarach tamid ohev oti” (“God Almighty always loves me”).
I cried again — this time from relief.
At the airport, a soldier greeted me and said she loved my videos. I kissed the ground outside, like the tzadikim, the holy righteous people, were said to do.
Israel immediately felt intense — beautiful mountains, Hebrew letters everywhere, ancient streets. In the cities of Tzfas and Miron, the birthplace of the kabbalah, I felt comfortable among Hasidim, amid the mystical nature of the place.
Other parts felt foreign: army bases, modern Israeli culture, the constant awareness of war.
We volunteered a lot — packing food, planting flowers. Painting a bomb shelter in a school was sobering.
But the moments that touched me most were simple ones: singing to elderly Yiddish speakers in a hospital, dancing with soldiers, and performing Shabbos songs in the shuk where crowds gathered around.
Then I went to the Kotel.
The moment I touched the Wall I burst into tears. I prayed for my family, for peace, and for inner calm.
Standing there, I realized something: Somehow, despite everything, I belonged here.
My show was scheduled for a few days later. But early that Shabbos morning, we woke to sirens.
War had escalated. We were rushed into bomb shelters. Birthright decided to evacuate us from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea.
My show was canceled.
I was devastated, but also strangely calm. War doesn’t care about your plans.
Soon we were evacuated again — this time out of the country through Egypt. At the hotel in Taba, surrounded by Birthright groups from all over the world, I had an idea. Why not do the show here?
The rabbi loved it. A flyer went out: “The First Ever Yiddish Show in Egypt.”
The setup was far from glamorous. No sound system, terrible acoustics, and we were competing with a belly dancer performance down the hall.
But I had my guitar. I sang with everything I had. People clapped, joined in, and some even played along on makeshift instruments.
It wasn’t the show I imagined. But somehow it was perfect.
From Egypt we flew to Greece, where we spent Purim together with Jews from around the world. In a random hotel in Athens we read the Megillah, booed Haman, and danced in the lobby until security shut us down.
Finally, after flights through Switzerland, we made it back to Newark.
The trip didn’t turn me into a political expert or a passionate Zionist. But something deeper happened. I fell in love with the place.
Israel feels messy, intense, spiritual, chaotic. And somehow, despite everything, like home.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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